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Although considered a literary group, members of The Movement saw themselves more as an actual movement, with each writer sharing a common purpose.[1]

The Movement poets were considered anti-romantic, but Larkin and Hughes featured romantic elements. To these poets, good poetry meant simple, sensuous content and traditional, conventional and dignified form.[citation needed]

The Movement's importance is its worldview that took into account Britain’s reduced dominance in world politics. The group's objective was to prove the importance of English poetry over the new modernist poetry. The members of The Movement were not anti-modernists; they were opposed to modernism, which was reflected in the Englishness of their poetry.[1]

The Movement sparked the divisions among different types of British poetry. Their poems were nostalgic for the earlier Britain and filled with pastoral images of the decaying way of life as Britain moved farther from the rural and more towards the urban.[1]

The Movement produced two anthologies, Poets of the 1950s (1955) (editor D. J. Enright, published in Japan) and New Lines (1956). Conquest, who edited the New Lines anthology, described the connection between the poets as 'little more than a negative determination to avoid bad principles.' These 'bad principles' are usually described as "excess", both in terms of theme and stylistic devices. Poets in the original New Lines anthology in 1956 included Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, Thom Gunn, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain.

The polemic introduction to New Lines particularly targeted the 1940s poets, the generation of Dylan Thomas[2]